Chicago in the Age of Capital

Abstract

This book, a sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, traces the evolution of a modern social order. Combining historical and political detail with a theoretical frame, the book examines the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class. The book demonstrates how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The new social movements that arose in this era—labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women's activism—constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and 1970s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago's new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, this book vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.

Urban Regimes and the Policing of Strikes in Two Gilded Age Cities: New York and Chicago

“…30 But while these two exemplary developments in class self-organization indicated the aspiration of Yankee capitalists to exercise the kind of political authority that the Swallowtails had in New York, they were unable to extend their leadership into the social terrain still occupied by the new foreign-born working class and middling elements, which had stepped onto the public stage as populists a year earlier. 31 Despite abjuring temperance and forming the Central Church, the city's leading men could never disentangle themselves from Evangelical Protestant culture. That was evident in the 1876 mass revival held in Chicago by the preacher Dwight L. Moody.…”

Class Wars: Race, Class, and Violence in the Long Gilded Age

“…All the reconstructions—north, south, east, and west—would need to be smothered. To the point, John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov (2015: 242) argue that class relations in post–Civil War Chicago, including the 1877 general strike, should be conceived “in the rise to national dominance of capitalism” that includes the “context of Reconstruction, which is commonly viewed by historians as a Southern question.” Despite this gesture, they share Moody’s notion that capitalism rose to national dominance during this period, as if the antebellum slave economy (or postwar sharecropping) wasn’t capitalism. Echoing an emerging and promising trend in scholarship loosely figured as new histories of capitalism and slavery (Beckert and Rockman, 2016; Hyman and Baptist, 2017; Rosenthal, 2018), scholars like Scott Huffard Jr. point to new directions for framing the period (2019: 5), writing that we should “see the Old South as a site of capitalist disaster,” and the “New South not as an aberration, but as a function of untrammeled capitalism.”…”